1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to the field of automated test equipment (ATE) for semiconductor testing. In particular, the present invention relates to a method and system for controlling interchangeable components in a modular test system.
2. Description of Related Art
A major reason for the high cost of test equipment is the specialized nature of conventional tester architecture. Each tester manufacturer has a number of tester platforms that are not only incompatible across companies such as Advantest, Teradyne, and Agilent, but also incompatible across platforms within a company, such as the T3300, T5500, and T6600 series testers manufactured by Advantest. Because of these incompatibilities, each tester requires its own specialized hardware and software components, and these specialized hardware and software components cannot be used on other testers. In addition, a significant effort is required to port a test program from one tester to another, and to develop third-party solutions. Even when a third-party solution is developed for a platform, it cannot be ported or reused on a different platform. The translation process from one platform to another is generally complex and error prone, resulting in increased effort, time, and test cost.
Another problem of the specialized tester architecture is that all hardware and software remain in a fixed configuration for a given tester. To test a device-under-test (DUT) or an integrated circuit (IC), a dedicated test program is developed that uses some or all of the tester capabilities to define the test data, signals, waveforms, current, and voltage levels, as well as to collect the DUT response and to determine DUT pass/fail.
Since a test system needs to exercise a wide range of functionalities and operations in order to test a wide variety of test modules and their corresponding DUTs, there is a need for an open architecture test system that can be configured to support the wide variety of test modules. Specifically, in order to support the wide variety of test modules, there is a need for a module control framework within the open architecture test system that can be configured to support the integration of one or more vendor modules into the test system during testing of a particular vendor module and its corresponding DUTs.